Hi, James! I hope you're doing well. I'm very much looking forward to seeing what Pathfinder Second Edition brings!
What are your thoughts on the cryptid known as dogman?
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I notice you have to repeat the 'one question per post' rule a lot. Would it be possible to have a site administrator or moderator add a banner or heading of some sort at the top of the thread with the rules for posting? It might free you up to spend less time repeating yourself and more time answering questions. Just a suggestion!
I doubt that'd solve the problem, frankly. And our website folks have bigger fish to fry than to tinker with a thread title. I don't mind repeating the "one question per post" line when needed, frankly, since it doesn't happen THAT often.
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Have you ever seen Gravity Falls, if not I highly recommend it.
I haven't. But an animated show from Disney? No thanks... I'm annoyed with Disney at the moment, and what looks like a sanitizing purge of 20th Century Fox's horror legacy, including the Exorcist TV show and, potentially, the Alien franchise.
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Is there anything in canon that Dragons can contract Rabies?
Dragons aren't immune to disease. Rabies is a disease. Dragons can get rabies, just like any other creature that's not immune to disease. Dragons have excellent fortitude saves so it'll be less likely for them to get rabies on average than dogs and bats and skunks who have MUCH lower saving throws, being low CR animals.
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Did prophecy stop working across the whole universe at the time of Aroden's death, or just on Golarion?
You assume prophecy worked in the first place and wasn't just something that us mortals were misunderstanding as functional when, in fact, we were reading truth into coincidences.
Here's the thing. The way prophecy is used in fantasy fiction is an old, tired, lazy cliche that simply Does Not Work in interactive fiction like a tabletop RPG, where the flow of the story is 100% up to the players to influence. We don't include prophecy elements in our games unless they're specifically set up as being faulty or broken, because the instant we build an adventure in which there's only one potential outcome because it HAS to follow a prophecy, then we're removing agency from the players of the game, and turning a roleplaying game into nothing more than four to six people sitting at a table listening to their GameMaster turn into a narrator and simply tell them a story in which their character choices don't matter.
Prophecy doesn't work in RPGs. Not just in Golarion or Pathfinder, but in RPGs as a general rule, UNLESS the RPG is specifically designed in a way that your player characters are not supposed to have agency and in which your choices don't ultimately matter. That doesn't sound fun to me as a GM or a player.
In the hands of a talented writer, prophecy themes and elements can work very well in a novel or movie or other non-interractive form of entertainment. It's still a cliche, but a talented writer can rise above any cliche, including prophecy.
Is there anything in canon that Dragons can contract Rabies?Dragons aren't immune to disease. Rabies is a disease. Dragons can get rabies, just like any other creature that's not immune to disease. Dragons have excellent fortitude saves so it'll be less likely for them to get rabies on average than dogs and bats and skunks who have MUCH lower saving throws, being low CR animals.
Did you know that only mammals can get rabies?
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Did you know that only mammals can get rabies?Is there anything in canon that Dragons can contract Rabies?Dragons aren't immune to disease. Rabies is a disease. Dragons can get rabies, just like any other creature that's not immune to disease. Dragons have excellent fortitude saves so it'll be less likely for them to get rabies on average than dogs and bats and skunks who have MUCH lower saving throws, being low CR animals.
I did, but that's not something that the game rules model. We don't want to go down the rabbit hole of having to list, for every single disease (and thus, it would be implied, for poison) a mini-list of who and what sorts of creatures can or can't be affected by that particular disease or poison. Feel free to do that deep dive in your game if you want, but having to decide whether or not creature A is affected by affliction Z every time the combination comes up is a lot more complicated and less fun than just checking if creature A is immune to affliction Z.
Prophecy doesn't work in RPGs. Not just in Golarion or Pathfinder, but in RPGs as a general rule, UNLESS the RPG is specifically designed in a way that your player characters are not supposed to have agency and in which your choices don't ultimately matter. That doesn't sound fun to me as a GM or a player.
How do you feel about settings that change Prophecy from "This must be" to "If this happens, then this will follow" as a way to give agency back to players, let them make choices, and potentially even manipulate prophecies themselves? The best example I can think of this would be Eberron, but I am sure there are others as well.
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How do you feel about settings that change Prophecy from "This must be" to "If this happens, then this will follow" as a way to give agency back to players, let them make choices, and potentially even manipulate prophecies themselves? The best example I can think of this would be Eberron, but I am sure there are others as well.Prophecy doesn't work in RPGs. Not just in Golarion or Pathfinder, but in RPGs as a general rule, UNLESS the RPG is specifically designed in a way that your player characters are not supposed to have agency and in which your choices don't ultimately matter. That doesn't sound fun to me as a GM or a player.
It's not really prophecy in that case, so why bother jumping through all those hoops to redefine a cliche? Better to just let the cliche go. There's plenty of other stories you can tell that don't rely on prophecy, as I think we've demonstrated over the past decade-plus of content for Golarion.
Have you ever seen Gravity Falls, if not I highly recommend it.I haven't. But an animated show from Disney? No thanks... I'm annoyed with Disney at the moment, and what looks like a sanitizing purge of 20th Century Fox's horror legacy, including the Exorcist TV show and, potentially, the Alien franchise.
In fairness it's not your typical Disney channel cartoon, as evidenced by it getting cancelled after two seasons.
And it did have the sheriff and his deputy in a same sex relationship.
It's on Hulu if you want to give it a chance.
Did you like the Dreamland season of Archer?
What about vague, unspecific, or contextual prophecies, like Harry Potter for example?
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What about vague, unspecific, or contextual prophecies, like Harry Potter for example?
I haven't read the Harry Potter novels, but I have seen the movies and they didn't impress me too much, and the element of prophecy in there was a non-event for me, in the light of other mediocrities or repetitive elements that the stories were never able to shed in my mind.
I greatly appreciate the Harry Potter stories for what they've done to help bolster the genre, and in that they inspired a younger generation than me to read, but I have always preferred much darker fiction. I was reading Stephen King and Clive Barker at age 10 or thereabouts and never looked back.
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What cliches do you feel are over- or under-used in adventure design?
Under-used? None.
Over-Used? Lots. But the weird thing there is that most of the adventures I work with are ones I'm developing, using raw author turnover, and I try to scour out those cliches before they see print... or at the very least try to make them less obnoxious.
Too many to list, in any event, but my current least-favorite cliche is when someone defines a supposedly powerful woman NPC without giving her any agency and defining her by what's happened to her rather than what she's accomplished herself (a cliche I've been guilty of myself in the past, alas).
What about vague, unspecific, or contextual prophecies, like Harry Potter for example?I haven't read the Harry Potter novels, but I have seen the movies and they didn't impress me too much, and the element of prophecy in there was a non-event for me, in the light of other mediocrities or repetitive elements that the stories were never able to shed in my mind.
I greatly appreciate the Harry Potter stories for what they've done to help bolster the genre, and in that they inspired a younger generation than me to read, but I have always preferred much darker fiction. I was reading Stephen King and Clive Barker at age 10 or thereabouts and never looked back.
The movies were a pale shadow of the books, not that they were dark.
The prophecy though was primarily interesting because it didn't mention Harry. There was a choice of who it could have been, and though in this case it was the antagonist making that choice, he still had to choose who he took as the greater threat, who he believed was most likely to make the prophecy true, cause the prophecy was not an absolute, it could fail, which was the entire reason he targeted Harry in the first place. This matter of choosing one's future which is not certain was the big point behind having it there.
So the idea is having a prophecy that is vague and uncertain can be used to add clues for the players, but also as a motivation for the antagonist to act against the pcs regardless of what they do.
So what do you think of this kind of prophecy?
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Don’t know if you’d be interested, but a Hellboy board game just launched on Kickstarter :3
Not too interested, nope (not into board games really), but thanks anyway!
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What about vague, unspecific, or contextual prophecies, like Harry Potter for example?I haven't read the Harry Potter novels, but I have seen the movies and they didn't impress me too much, and the element of prophecy in there was a non-event for me, in the light of other mediocrities or repetitive elements that the stories were never able to shed in my mind.
I greatly appreciate the Harry Potter stories for what they've done to help bolster the genre, and in that they inspired a younger generation than me to read, but I have always preferred much darker fiction. I was reading Stephen King and Clive Barker at age 10 or thereabouts and never looked back.
The movies were a pale shadow of the books, not that they were dark.
The prophecy though was primarily interesting because it didn't mention Harry. There was a choice of who it could have been, and though in this case it was the antagonist making that choice, he still had to choose who he took as the greater threat, who he believed was most likely to make the prophecy true, cause the prophecy was not an absolute, it could fail, which was the entire reason he targeted Harry in the first place. This matter of choosing one's future which is not certain was the big point behind having it there.
So the idea is having a prophecy that is vague and uncertain can be used to add clues for the players, but also as a motivation for the antagonist to act against the pcs regardless of what they do.
So what do you think of this kind of prophecy?
I think prophecy is cliche. This is not a challenge to the internet to change my opinion. If I ever come across a prophecy in a story that doesn't feel like a cliche, I shall be pleasantly surprised, but that won't change my belief that prophecy is a cliche.
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Did prophecy stop working across the whole universe at the time of Aroden's death, or just on Golarion?You assume prophecy worked in the first place and wasn't just something that us mortals were misunderstanding as functional when, in fact, we were reading truth into coincidences.Okay, let me rephrase:
Before Aroden's death, it was widely believed on Golarion (e.g. by the Azlanti oracular observatories discussed in PF122) that prophecy was real and functional; after Aroden's death, that belief went away. Was there a parallel shift on other worlds?
(I understand and support the design goal of removing prophecy from the game setting given that it doesn't play nicely with PC agency, but I also take it that you had reasons to explicitly deactivate prophecy - or at least, the belief in prophecy! - in the game setting in AR4606, rather than just establishing that it had never worked.)
There are still folks who believe in prophecies on Golarion and other worlds, just as there are in the real world, and in your version of the game, you're free to have prophecies work however you want. In products we publish, they're not a thing, be they products set on Golarion or elsewhere. We don't have to decide if prophecy is "real and functional" or how that impacts other worlds because that's not an element we'll be including in products we publish, beyond potentially now and then having a group who thinks a prophecy is valid or not and how they handle things if, by chance or design, their prophecy comes true or not.
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Why there are so few Theocracies in Golarion ?
Why do you think there's not a lot of theocracies on Golarion in the first place? Looking at the Inner Sea Nations alone, there's strong elements of theocracy (in some cases not toward deities but toward faiths/philosophies/godlike beings) in:
Absalom
Hold of Belkzen
Cheliax
The Darklands
Druma
Irrisen
Mediogalti Island
Nidal
Osirion
Qadira
Rahadoum
Razmiran
The Shackles
The Worldwound
That's more than a quarter of all the nations, and some of those other nations have pretty strong theocracy elements inside them in part (Thuvia, Varisia, etc.).
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Why do you think there's not a lot of theocracies on Golarion in the first place?
Because very few are actually ruled by Theocrats.
We know a lot about the gods, but know very little about religions.
If you need a adventure site (not in Cheliax or Razmiran because they are too churchy) for a political religious thriller, were you would recommend setting it ?
Example Theocracy of Pale in Greyhawk.
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Why do you think there's not a lot of theocracies on Golarion in the first place?Because very few are actually ruled by Theocrats.
We know a lot about the gods, but know very little about religions.
If you need a adventure site (not in Cheliax or Razmiran because they are too churchy) for a political religious thriller, were you would recommend setting it ?
Example Theocracy of Pale in Greyhawk.
There's a fair amount about religions in various products like Inner Sea Gods, Inner Sea Faiths, the deity/faith articles that appear in Pathfinder, etc.
You're right that very few are actually ruled by "theocrats" but that doesn't mean that the rest aren't theocracies. The reason very few are ruled by theocrats is because we wanted to vary the rule of nations WIDELY rather than have a single type of ruler be repeated too often.
As for your other question, it sounds like your'e asking for a nation that is religious but isn't focused on a single religion. Combined with a desire for politics... I'd say set it in Absalom, I guess.
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As for your other question, it sounds like your'e asking for a nation that is religious but isn't focused on a single religion. Combined with a desire for politics... I'd say set it in Absalom, I guess.
Yeah, i wanted a religion themed place. Where all religions would garther and have their own agency, but no one have power over others. Like a United Nations for religions. Absalom is the closest i could find, but lacks a bit of oomph. Do you think there could a place like that exist o Golarion ?
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As for your other question, it sounds like your'e asking for a nation that is religious but isn't focused on a single religion. Combined with a desire for politics... I'd say set it in Absalom, I guess.Yeah, i wanted a religion themed place. Where all religions would garther and have their own agency, but no one have power over others. Like a United Nations for religions. Absalom is the closest i could find, but lacks a bit of oomph. Do you think there could a place like that exist o Golarion ?
Absalom is the right place. We've published a 64 page book on the city and some day will do more, but yeah, it's absolutely my number one site to recommend for a religious/political themed campaign setting.
If you don't think it has "oomph," then take that as a challenge to get in there and oomph it up! :-P
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Don’t know if you’d be interested, but a Hellboy board game just launched on Kickstarter :3Not too interested, nope (not into board games really), but thanks anyway!
Np, I'll try to keep an eye out for things you might like ^w^
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What's your take on 0th-level Adventures? Would Paizo be interested in having rules for it?
I like the concept of an adventure that, as you play it, the events and interactions you have help to mold the destiny and scope and direction of your character, but that's kinda the point of every 1st level adventure to a certain extent. Not a big fan of the 0-level mechanics that D&D tried out a few decades back, but I do like the idea that before you're a 1st level anything you're something else, but not a commoner.
@JJ Have you or anyone within Paizo considered a PF variant of Spelljammer?
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@JJ Have you or anyone within Paizo considered a PF variant of Spelljammer?
No.
1) We can't really legally or ethically do a "Spelljammer" because we don't own that intellectual property.
2) It's my least favorite D&D setting, so it'd be on the bottom of the list of D&D settings to risk getting sued over making a duplicate of.
3) Starfinder is MUCH more in line with my preference for science-fantasy.
Hi James,
I can't remember if this was asked, but are you watching The Terror, and if so what do you think about it?
Also, speaking of Hellboy above, are you looking forwards to Neil Marshall's film version?
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Also, speaking of Hellboy above, are you looking forwards to Neil Marshall's film version?
Absolutely. Neil Marshall is an incredible director, and the fact that it sounds like the forces that be will let this version of Hellboy be rated R is also very interesting.
Are there any questions you want to ask us?This isn't the place for me to ask questions of folks—when I do need to ask questions of folks I generally post the question elsewhere in the forums.
Where woukd that be?
Also, why do feedback forums go missing?
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Are there any questions you want to ask us?This isn't the place for me to ask questions of folks—when I do need to ask questions of folks I generally post the question elsewhere in the forums.Where woukd that be?
Also, why do feedback forums go missing?
Where it would be would be where it needs to be. If it's a question I'd like feedback on an adventure path, it'll be there. If it's a question I'd like feedback on a specific product, it'll be in that product thread. If it's something random, I'll make a new thread here in the off-topic forum. I generally don't ask questions though so don't expect to see me doing it often.
I don't know the answer to your other question; sounds like something to ask on the website feedback forum.
Hi James,
How does Sarenrae view prana ghosts from Occult Bestiary (pages 40-41), who willingly avoid judgement after death, but aren't undead and can actually be quite benevolent?
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If I recall correctly, Return of the Runelords is supposed to go up to level 20. On the product descriptions we can't yet see what the levels will be for each adventure. What will be the levels for each module in that AP? Also, will the last PF1 AP be going to 20 as well or is that still undecided/too early to announce?